Search This Blog

the statist cycle

We often talk of the business enterprise and the business cycle. Interestingly, the dominant political system in most developed economies may also be regarded as a cyclic enterprise. It can properly be called the statist cycle. The statist nature of these governments is the only constant, regardless of whether the particular one in question is progressive (i.e. left-wing) or conservative (i.e. right-wing), differing only in their particular emphases. It is the biased and prejudiced opinion of this author that left-wing governments are more statist than right-wing ones (although, this may be an insignificant difference in degree and not of kind, and, hence, caveat lector).

Without further ado,.....

The statist cycle :

1. identify a socio-economic "problem" (real or imaginary)

2. spend money to create a new bureaucracy agency or program to fix said problem

9. blame capitalism (and point to the failure of the crony corporatists identified in point 6, as an example)

10. teach/propagandize the virtues of all of the above actions in the K-12 public school and university system, in the guise of education

11. dumb down K-12 education in order to produce dumbed-down and zombified citizenry who are not practitioners of critical thinking (achieved via (a) shifting emphasis from language, literature, math, logic, philosophy, history, economics and the hard sciences to "soft" sciences and celebration of mediocrity and "creative" thinking and merit-free and groundless inflation of self-esteem, (b) psychotropic drugging to address "behavioral" problems while, simultaneously, neutering parents and discouraging parent-centric and family-centric discipline of children, (c) promoting the study of "education" and "pedagogy", instead of the mastery of individual subjects and disciplines, among teachers, through public funds and perverse tenure incentivization and (d) promoting the "study" of whimsies and fancies and insubstantial and inconsequential "subjects", masquerading as the liberal arts)

12. tout the virtues of all of the above through the complicit corporatist media complex

13. rinse, repeat

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

Popular posts from this blog

The following contains notes from various attempts at migrating 2.5GB of MS SQL Server data to MongoDB, on an 8 GB, quad-core, 64-bit Windows 7 Enterprise machine. [TERMINATED] http://mssql2mongo.codeplex.com/ : Simple to use. Exponential slowdown observed in migration. For a total of the 50 million records spanning two tables, the following migration times were observed: 1 second for the first 100,000 records, 30 minutes for 1,000,000, 20 hours for 16 million (after which I terminated the process).[DID NOT WORK] http://rubydoc.info/gems/mongify/ : A ruby-based approach. Use Ruby 1.9.3 (tiny_tds dependency causes problems with Ruby 2.0). Install DevKit before installing the mongify gem. Also, use 'sqlserver' as the adapter in the .config file. Then, before running 'mongify check <config-file>', install the gems activerecord-sqlserver-adapter and tiny_tds. At this stage, it fails. 'mongify translation <config-file>' fails as well.[MODIFIED/WORKED!!]…

or, progressive socialism is not the greater evil.
Introduction
After years of trying to make sense of how the world works, economically and politically, and how, according to some, it ought to work, I have increasingly come to the realization that the libertarian political-philosophical persuasion is the only one consistent with justice. A just society must necessarily be a free society. Specifically, one that is founded on libertarian principles -- private property, NAP, non-initiation of violence, easement & homesteading rights, etc. In fact, the “justness” (righteousness) of a society will increase in concert with and to the degree to which a society moves from totalitarian statism to democratic statism (of the neo-conservative or neo-liberal varieties) to minarchism to anarchism.
After spending a few zealous but misguided and ignorantly happy years occupied with mainstream GOP politics, including loyally and foolishly supporting the Bush-Cheney-Rove regime, despite serious mo…

There are so many strains of thought and ideology in secular democracies around the world, exemplified, perhaps best, in contemporary American political life. Some of these strains of thought are compatible with others and may even be subsets of others. Many of them are violently opposed to others. In the American context, we see, at least, the following : environmentalismcultural progressivismeconomic socialismprogressive-lite Keynesian welfare + neocon warfare hawks = the establishment / moderates / centristscivil libertarianismnon-interventionismsocial conservatismConstitutional conservatismfree-market libertarianismpopulism, protectionism & nativism, anti-progressivism, anti-establishment
A neat left-right divide no longer makes sense. Most people find themselves on a spectrum between very different political philosophies and emphases.
The two major political parties represent uneasy marriages that exist because for historical reasons or current tactical alliances. The fragil…